1.
It’s a warm day at some point in the mid-1970s, and I’m at the record store about to pick out the first album I’ll buy with my own money. I am five or six, and my grandmother has taken me “uptown” in Salisbury, North Carolina, to the record store on Innes Street. One of the family legends—a legend in my mind, at least—is about my mother being a child and going uptown with her own grandmother. Mamaw would dress them both up, and they’d wear white gloves, 2as you did. Here I am a little over twenty years later, probably not dressed up at all. I’m wearing shorts or jeans, most likely. Possibly a sundress my mom made me on the sewing machine. (Those mother-daughter sundresses are the only thing I remember her ever sewing.) Anyway, the fifties are over, and even the sixties, and here I am gloveless about to buy a Beatles record. Before I go in, I ask Joe—my mother’s baby brother—which one is best, and he says, “All of them.” I feel momentarily at sea, as part of the fun was going to be impressing Joe with my purchase. But Joe walks away from us on the sidewalk to go look at bikes, and I must make the decision on my own, armed with the knowledge that there’s no wrong choice. (Or is there?) Finally, after some consternation, I buy Let It Be. The Beatles all look friendly on the cover. Except John. Well, Ringo looks a bit fed up, as well, now that I look at it. Or maybe just tired.

2.
In an earlier, scene I’m even younger, maybe four. If I am four, Joe is nine. We’re on Gates Street in front of my grandmother’s house, standing by the curb. (Is this when I still call her Mama sometimes because Joe does?) He is having me say the names of the Beatles. I don’t remember if this is for his own amusement, or if he is having me do it for someone else, as a sort of party trick. “Paul, George, John, and Ringo,” I say, my preferred order. “No,” he says. “You’re supposed to say John, Paul, George, and Ringo.” I refuse. Paul is first in my heart and on my list.

3.
I am seven and Joe is twelve. We are sitting in the spare room watching a TV broadcast of Yellow Submarine. My grandfather is downstairs in what is normally the den, but he is on a bed in the middle of the room, dying. My mother and I are visiting from Knoxville, where she is a graduate student in psychology. She works in the animal behavior lab, feeding newborn mice to the two-headed snake. She won’t let me watch them eat, but I’ve looked at the mice, naked as thumbs, wriggling in their box. I don’t know how the occasion of the trip has been presented to me. Often when my mother had to give me bad news, she presented it as something that “could” happen, and I would be shocked when it did. Before we went to the airport—which in itself was unusual, as it’s only a four-hour drive between the two towns—she had picked up some medicine at the pharmacy in Knoxville to bring with us to Salisbury. Now I wonder what it was. Morphine? But why wouldn’t they have had that in Salisbury? The pharmacist was very nice to me and gave me a coloring book and some crayons for the trip, free of charge. I knew then that something strange was happening. I didn’t know the word for it, but I recognized what it was: pity. Joe and I sit and watch, immersed in the world of the Blue Meanies and the acid-mild cartoon Beatles. And then my mom and grandmother are walking into the room, both crying a little. Before they can say anything, Joe is yelling, “Noooo!” and either rushing out of the room or toward my grandmother. I have to wait to be told before I get it. My grandfather is dead.

4.
My mom’s second husband plays the Rolling Stones loud. Really loud. I am in second grade, third grade. The sound is an assault, both for the sound itself and the self-centeredness of the act. This is not all that he was—he also brought me stacks of 45s from the record store where he worked. I had most of the hits of 1979-1981 in a box in my room. Steve Martin singing his novelty hit “King Tut”; Pat Benatar; “Cruel to Be Kind” by Nick Lowe. My tastes in pop music at this age were broad and ecumenical. But the Rolling Stones it takes me much longer to like. For years it was Beatles over Stones.

5.
When I am nine, I live with my grandmother for half a year. My mom is on the verge of divorcing her second husband, but I don’t know this, either. My grandmother is still in a state of stunned depression that I now realize was probably grief and tiredness. Joe has started high school and has grown to over six feet tall, seemingly overnight. Occasionally he will deign to speak to me. He does let me scratch his feet with the letter opener, but I must stay on my end of the couch. One night after we are all asleep, someone bangs on the door loudly until we’re all awake. It is Mike, Joe’s friend from down the street. A guy with what I would now describe as an odd energy, Mike is a little older, but hangs around with all the kids. Now he is at the door late at night, weeping, hysterical, and demanding to speak to Joe. John Lennon has been shot.

The next day, Granny is peering out the front window at dusk to see if anyone has a candle out for John, muttering, “I lit one for Kennedy, but I’m not lighting one for him.”

6.
I guess it’s that same year that John starts to talk to me from the White Album poster? My mom and I are living alone in grad student housing, and I have the poster from her original pressing of the album in my room, next to my bunk beds. I’ve developed a number of strange compulsions. I count my syllables when I speak, tapping a finger surreptitiously against my leg as I do. There’s some equation about how many steps I have to do in each sidewalk square that I don’t even remember now. And not only can I not step on cracks for fear of breaking my mother’s back, but I can’t step on the dividing lines between sidewalk squares, either. John Lennon tells me these things, and it’s possible that John is the devil. I can tell by the way he stares out so intently from the poster. Also, I think I saw a hysterical teenaged boy say something to that effect in a Beatles documentary. When I finally admit some version of these thoughts to my mother, posing it as a question—“So, do you think it’s possible that John Lennon is the devil? Can he see me from the poster?”—my mom brings a child psychologist to our apartment. He has me calm my mind and imagine that I am in a meadow of flowers. I find it embarrassing. Later my mom asks if I could see myself meeting with the psychologist every week. I’m alarmed, as I didn’t see that coming. I tell her I don’t feel that it’s necessary and I don’t want to. Nope. I won’t go. At some point, John stops talking to me.

7.
Years later, I will teach an essay to teenagers about the subversive power of Beatlemania[1]. The authors argue that for young Beatlemaniacs, the band offered a vision of sexuality that was “guileless, ebullient, and fun.” They suggest that part of the fun lay in the Beatles’ androgyny. While commentators like Dr. Joyce Brothers saw the Beatles’ “girlishness” as providing a safe outlet for young women’s burgeoning sexuality, Ehrenreich, et al. argue that “the Beatles construed sex more generously and playfully, lifting it out of the rigid scenario of mid-century American gender roles, and it was this that made them wildly sexy.” Some girls, in fact, likely identified with the Beatles, not just wanting to be with them, but in part wanting to be them. Reading about these theories of Beatlemania, I think back to playing the make out game with Lisa, whose parents also lived in the graduate student family apartments. We listened to Sgt. Pepper, our favorite, and I would pretend to be Paul to her adoring fan.

8.
I find myself extremely frustrated with some boy at my dorm freshman year who acts like he can in any way school me on the Beatles. No. Another boy stands in front of my Beatles poster—the poster made up of four psychedelic portraits in a grid, which they may still sell at college bookstores—and tells me I really must try shrooms at some point. They take away your inhibitions and they’re just totally natural. My core of Beatle fandom is part of what gives me power over these boys and makes me feel not at all bad about showing them to the door when they became tedious. A core of knowledge, of desire all my own.

9.
Before I even reach high school, my Beatles albums are stolen by my mom’s third husband, upon the occasion of their break up. When I receive my crates of records, along with my other possessions delivered from his house—no Beatles.

10.
I’m in my early thirties, and in a quasi-dating situation with a fairly odd guy in the Twin Cities. He’s at my apartment in late winter, and we’re watching a documentary about the early days of the Beatles. We learn that we both have a deep and abiding affection for the Beatles. Even so, our connection feels somehow removed. That is, we have one, but it is polite and never quite lands. Still, there’s something deeply enjoyable about a chill afternoon of remote, companionable shared Beatles fandom. Later, he will drive me to a used bookstore and run in to buy me a gift. He wants me to have the AA handbook in order to understand him better. I refuse to take it. At home in a drawer somewhere, I already have the one my biological father sent me.

11.
I’m between boyfriends in graduate school, driving around listening to Let It Be all these years later. I’ve bought it on CD, and I zip around whatever state I’m in re-encountering a deeply familiar album I haven’t listened to from start to finish in years. I’m making circles back and forth between the eastern states and those of the Midwest, looking for something (education, companionship, a connection to landscape). At one point, I listen to “Two of Us” and feel momentarily lost—there is no longer a “Two of Us”—before settling on a different feeling, the “two of us” as me and the Beatles, or maybe as me and some other, inviolable version of myself.

Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press) and What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press). Her work has appeared in South Dakota Review, Zocálo Public Square, Open Letters Monthly, Posit, Poetry International, and other journals. Her digital chapbook of collaborative poems with Todd Colby, I’m Glad I Know You, was published by Poetry Crush. She is an editor at Trio House Press and lives in Durham, NC.[/caption]

She wears green eye shadow. Sea-green eye shadow from her lashes to her brows. A crocheted sweater that exactly matches the eye shadow. A patterned skirt that exactly matches the sweater and the eye shadow.

She’s super-coordinated. The coordination strikes me as intentional. She’s chosen her outfit for its effect, although her idea of its effect and mine are probably different. It’s a trap, an assertion of control.

She reminds me of my Italian cousins. Square brick houses on tight suburban streets with Madonnas-in-bathtubs on front lawns. She has a mouth like Cher, glossy and pink. I can’t stop staring at her. I’m fascinated.

I despise her. I wish I was in Newark. I can see the entrance to the train station, the dirty tan stone steps. Hunched men in shadows and the late night underground glare. I can walk right past them or stop. I know I’m going to stop.

Karen Schoemer is a poet, author and performer living in Columbia County, New York. She was the inaugural Virginia Scholar at Instarlodge in Germantown in the fall of 2016, and her poem “November Sun” won first prize in the 2015 Hudson Valley Writers Guild poetry contest. She is vocalist for the bands Sky Furrows, Jaded Azurites and the Schoemer Formation.

As a black boy, I flew
Back when most colored folk
could only afford the Greyhound bus.

During those hour-long flights
between LA and Oakland,
I couldn’t tell if I was somehow Rosa

or if my grandfather was unsuccessful
indoctrinating me into the 60’s
or if I was just a black boy

or if getting selected for additional screening
every flight was still prefaced by the term “random”
or if they had rather used hoses instead of wands

Still, somehow, each time I boarded,
the jetway seemed a partition in which
I could change in an out of my skin at will

or I was just a black boy
or I was just black
or I was just a boy

Daniel B. Summerhill is an internationally recognized poet and performance artist from Oakland, CA. Currently an M.F.A. candidate at Boston’s Pine Manor College, Daniel has performed in over 15 states as well as abroad in Europe. He has shared stages with poets Jasmine Mans, Abiodun Oyewole and others. He has published two collections of poems and has been asked to perform at Ted Talk, Def Jam Poetry with Danny Simmons as well as Afropunk London.

In What We Do: Essays for Poets (Chax Press 2016) Michael Gottlieb addresses poetry, poetry-making, and what it means to live among a community of poets. It’s a sequel of sorts to Memoir and Essay, Gottlieb’s 2011 account of his early days as a member of the Language poets, which remains a must-read for those considering a life of poetry. His affecting 9/11 poem, “The Dust,” hailed by Ron Silliman as one of the “Five greatest Language poems,” was staged by Fiona Templeton and company at the Poetry Project at St. Marks on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. We sent questions about What We Do: Essays for Poets, and Gottlieb was generous with his responses.

First off, what got you thinking about writing the material for this book?

Well, this is the kind of thing I sit around talking about with friends: how are we supposed to live our lives? As poets? Or, maybe just …as people? How do I deal with this, or this, or this? How do I deal with having to make money? How do I deal with being responsible to myself, as a writer, and what do I do when my other responsibilities—like to my family—seem to conflict? What do I do as I get older?

In What We Do, you talk a lot about the poet in comparison to the artist. Why do you make this distinction?

There’s one section in particular when I compare poets and artists. In that section, I tried to compare poets, poets who are my age specifically, my generation, to our age peers among the painters and artists. What I was interested in discussing was how similar these two groups are. What we have always been interested in, the features and elements in our work, where we lived and went to school—all of those things are so similar. So many of us knew each other, know each other now. And yet: the painters we’re talking about are spotted sporting the Légion d’Honneur to openings of their touring retrospectives, while the poets are enjoying solitary ramen specials at… well, I describe them dining at what is now a closed lunch mill called Dojo, near NYU. I used to go there a lot. There were two of them, in fact. I never liked them. Very depressing joints.

And the reason why comparing these two groups is so interesting to me is that, I guess it’s obvious what differentiates us, what sets us apart from each other is the economic value that the world attaches to, and applies to our respective work. Otherwise, we are essentially identical: background, interest, what we think about, what we focus on. All of that, all the same.

A lot of your commentary centers on New York City, particularly the growth and transformation of it. It seems you correlate New York City to the life of the poet?

I have been writing about New York City forever. My first book, published in the ’70s, was made from lists of words that I found walking around in New York, and illustrated with photos of New York and collages made up of stuff found on the street in New York. I mean, New York has been so central to me as a writer that back in the ’90s, I published a book that was simply titled New York. And it consists of two long poems: “The Great Pavement” and “The Ulterior Parkways.” They are about, and from, built up out of the language of that city. What else could they be about, with titles like that? I guess it’s hard for me to get away from thinking about the city. And then there’s “The Dust,” a poem I wrote about 9/11. That’s a long list poem, and an elegy and I guess it’s also a New York poem too—it’s a list of what was in the dust that day, everything in the towers that was turned into dust, from the building to the people to their files and furniture to the fire trucks, too, in New York City.

I guess it’s been a focus in every thing I’ve written, all my poetry, my memoir work and these essays too, as Rae Armantrout commented. Why? Why has New York been the focus, the subject, the ground that my writing lives in, or sits on or stands upon?

First, because it’s New York. This is where I spent my youth. This is where I became a poet. While these essays try and surface issues, topics, questions, like I sketched out above, that I’ve been talking about with friends, with other poets, been trying to answer myself, since then, New York is where I started thinking about this stuff. And, I guess as I wrote those essays, and felt compelled to turn some of those questions into dramatic presentations—here is a person trying to figure this or that out, in a bar, at a reading, on the street, it’s natural that that street should be in New York—the New York of today or maybe the New York in the day when I for one started thinking about those things.

And because of where we lived then, when we were young, and the kind of place New York was then, thirty, forty years ago, it’s easy to describe it now as a kind of fabulously dangerous place. Not that it wasn’t. But just walking down the streets in the empty quarters where we lived, there was so much—from the street names, to the fading signs half-hanging off the buildings, to the history of the building itself—this was the first location of that brand, that chain, that now girdles the globe. How could you not write about this place?

But you asked specifically about the growth and transformation of New York. I’ve always been interested in how New York changes, how one of its defining characteristics, what it is famous for, is its unrelenting embrace of transformation. For so long that was what New York was famous for: tearing itself down and building something bigger, taller, fancier. While when we first came to New York, there seemed to be an eerie pause in that—which many took to be a sign that the city was over, done with, one of many signs. Of course, that was only a pause. Not an end point. And that constant tearing-down and rebuilding has again become a constant.

The fact is: every New York that we ‘know,’ or think we know, is itself a product of one or another wave of ‘transformation,’ of tearing down and rebuilding, of one wave another of new people, new money, coming in and pushing out the old. Since the Dutch, we’ve been doing that. The Native Americans were the first victims of gentrification in New York. We’ve been throwing people out of their houses ever since. Watching the city get changed, watching who does it, what happens to the people who get tossed, that’s important to do, someone has to. And it’s instructive, too.

Then there’s the possibility that one might have had a role, however insignificant, in all this. When we walk those same streets these days, me with friends of mine from those older days, and we remember running in these streets in our youth, when the streets were empty, and dirty and dangerous, but mostly empty, we do ask ourselves if perhaps we had some role, however tiny, in turning these neighborhoods into what they are now. After all, it was people like us, and us among them, who first ‘found’ these neighborhoods—as if they had been lost. As if, in many cases, there weren’t people already living there. People who had to leave, had to move their homes or their businesses, when enough of us showed up, in the same way that we in turn have been moved out of the neighborhood because we in turn cannot afford to live here. All we can do is visit now, though there’s less and less reason to. God, just look what they’ve turned this place into…that’s what we say to each other now. Look, there’s a CVS where that bar used to be. There’s an Apple Store where the post office used to be… And so it goes, on and on…

You also address poetic life across the generations and over a span of many decades, the generational aspect of poetic life.

I think the generational aspect of poetic “life” is central. Don’t all poets identify themselves as belonging to one generation or another? How much of how we define ourselves is based on what generation we are part of? How much is based on what generation we are decidedly not part of? That generational “for and against” thing is so very important, isn’t it? As poets, to what degree to we define ourselves by who we are against? And how often is that a generation? I think this is entirely common, and not particularly troubling. This is just the way it is. Perhaps I feel this way because I am a boomer, and generation-related issues, challenges, boasts and curses have been associated with my generation all its life. And, concomitantly, I am part of a poetry generation that decidedly defined itself in opposition to a whole roster of generations.

But, on the other hand, it also seems to me—and I think this is even more to the point, when it comes to answering your question—that poetry communities are often much more multi-generational in their demographic make-up than, say, other kinds of communities of writers or artists. I think so, but I’m not sure. When I go to a poetry reading I’m used to seeing several generations of poets, friends and friends of friends, in one room. At a opening in a gallery I don’t often see that.

And, when it comes to the issues these essays try to deal with…how those issues are variously, differently, or similarly faced by different generations of poets—that is a fascinating subject for me. Are things different for you? Better? Worse? Are these issues, challenges, dilemmas, cul de sacs, dead ends, the ones I came across when I was your age…are they the same for you? Is the world a worse place for the poets? Better? The same?

Have things gotten better since it became possible to poet and an academic? I guess, that’s one of the questions this book tries to address. Have things gotten better even if you, you poet you, did get to be an academic, but you’re still working as a waitress to make ends meet? That’s another question this book tries to address.

There’s that area of the life of the poet that you talk about a lot regarding disappointment. At one point, you ask whether the things that are going wrong in the poet’s life are “something we’ve been ‘asking for.’” Do you think this is always part of the poet’s struggle?

Do I really talk about disappointment that much? Yikes. I don’t—or, I hope I don’t—spend more time on the topic of disappointment than one should. Disappointment, or accepting it, from time to time, or all the time, or sometime…is something that seems worthy of attention. No? I think that’s worth writing about. But is it the poet’s lot to experience more disappointment than others? I don’t want to suggest that.

I think there certainly are a range of factors that could tend a poet, could bend her or him, towards behaviors that will, yes, result, perhaps quickly, perhaps only eventually, in all manner of disappointment. Those behavioral factors are to be found in all kinds of folks though, not just poets. Having said that, I have an opinion as to whether poets sometimes brandish their vocation like a badge—justifying certain behaviors. But that’s another topic.

So, no. I don’t think poets are fated to meet disappointment more than others.

You evoke a lot of self-questioning and self-evaluation in this book, which is amazing. Did you intend for the book to be an interactive piece in this sense?

You are right! This book is all about self-questioning and self-evaluation. It is made up of questions. There are three long essays. Each essay has about thirty sections. Each section starts with a question, a question about what it means to be a poet, how to live one’s life as a poet, questions about all that. What then follows are possible answers to that question, or more questions, based on that question. And these are questions, like we’ve been saying, that I think all poets ask themselves, or will, sooner or later. These are questions I ask myself and I know others do too, because some of them come from them, from other poets. As I say, these essays are built out of those conversations. I list their names, there’s several dozen, at the back of the book. They were all so generous with their thoughts and their time.

My hope, my fondest hope, is that someone will come across this book, and see all of these questions, and find them, find them, somehow, helpful. I would not presume that the text which comes after those initial questions—the ones that start each section of each essay—are answers. They are not meant to be answers. I wouldn’t venture to claim that this book has answers.

I notice you call a lot of emotions into question, particularly those of the poet. Is that the part of the life of the poet that most engages you?

No, no, no. Of course not. It is the life of the mind that calls out to me. Am I not just like you, or you, or you? It is the theory, and then the praxis, and the iterations and the adumbrations which occupy my waking thoughts. It is how we, as Language poets, construed a complex, compound systematic complex of theory, that is what engages me, night and day. And how that theory has been instantiated in this writer and this writer, this writer, and from this group of writers and this type of writer to that and that and that.

Actually, no. All that was a lie. I don’t think about theory that much any more at all. When I was young, yes. It was by living out the theory that we claimed to uphold that we enraged so many others, those who were older than us and those who we saw as beholden to those older ones. Nowadays, I do pay attention to the theory and the theorizing of those who’ve come after me, but I don’t need to spend all day on topics like that.

Do I spend more of my day on things like emotions? Yes. And if, as you put it, I ‘call a lot of emotions into question,’ it is because I look back at my life and see how much of it, in particular my life as a poet, was in fact driven by emotions—like, ambition, envy, anger, jealousy, and yes, occasionally, joy. That’s an emotion too, isn’t it? And in that way, to that extent, I don’t think that I was, or am, any more ambitious, envious, angry, jealous or, all in all, venal than any of my friends. Or, maybe, not too much more.

You do bring up academia, specifically the creative writing aspect of academia. Do you think there is a schism between the classic academic, the literary scholars that generally comes to mind, and the creative writing academic?

What a great question! This is a topic that I get close to discussing in the book. But there my full focus, every time the subject of the academic life came up, was all about the academic life for poets—compared to other poets, poets who weren’t, aren’t, can’t be poets…Specifically, what does it mean to make the choices we are obliged to make? Choices which lead us to that kind of life, this academic one or that “non-academic” one?

But that’s not the comparison you’re interested in…and is it indeed a “schism?” I’m not sure. While I know lots of academics who are poets and lots who aren’t I’m not sure I see them as oppositional in any particular way, at least not constitutionally as it were. I don’t see them as particularly at each other’s throats. But then, I don’t see them together, in the sense that I don’t sit in their offices or in their meetings—maybe just that interaction model, those sets of relationships, that’s enough to prompt a question like this.

Was it your goal to address everything regarding the poet you could think of, or did you not have any particular plan for writing the book?

It’s funny. I was just finishing my response to the last question and I found myself asking myself a question just like this one. I was asking myself if I find the poets I know as the as more apt to toss off aperçu any more frequently than any other group of people I know, or, for example, than a hypothetical control group of New York cabbies. And, further to that general question, I found myself asking myself if I am more or less likely to have a conversation with my poet friends that is more focused on those big question matters, about the world, discussed above, or whether any of them, any one of us, is more or less likely to toss off one of those aforementioned aperçu. And the answer is, I’m not sure.

And when I tell you the reason why, you’ll see that that’s also my answer to this last question. I can’t say that when I hang out with my poet friends, we talk any more about these big question topics than I do with other people, because I have to say that a great deal of the time when I do get together with other poets we end up talking about the topics that this book attempts to address: how do we live our lives as poets, what happens to us, what’s to become of us. Those are very different topics. At their most abstract, they don’t rise above the level of ethics. There is so much else that we could talk about, that art—for example—can be, or indeed should be.

But this book doesn’t address any of that. This book does not ask questions like: What is a poem about? Nor does it focus at all on topics like: How do I write a poem? This book doesn’t care about any of that. This book only focuses on: how do I live my life as a poet?

When it came to writing this book, I wrote it essay by essay. There are three principal essays in the book. Each one focuses on one of these how-do-I-live-my-life topics. Each one arose out of conversations with poets. Those conversations I mention above. We sit around, and this is what we talk about, at least a lot of the time, at least these are the conversations that I’m particularly interested in. I’m interested in having them with my oldest friends and all my other friends, the ones who are ten, twenty, more years younger. How do we live our lives? And those people are listed in the book. There are a couple dozen folks. And, after writing three of these essays, which came out originally in different magazines, or appeared in books, I came to believe that maybe they could go together.

I don’t think I think about these kind of questions more than anyone else. I’m interested in talking about them, which is why I’m so appreciative of all those people who talked about them with me. I have also been writing about them in one way or another for a long time. I can remember the poem where these topics, these questions, first appeared. It was also about taxi cabs, taxi cabs in New York City. This was still in the 1970s. The poem was made up of quotes overheard in taxi cabs, and lists of the names of taxi cab companies, which used to be painted on the back door of every New York City cab. Also included were other kinds of language and dialogue, including overheard questions about career and an individual’s choices and personal integrity.

So this is not everything I can think to talk “regarding the poet,” as you put it. There are a lot of other things to talk and think about, a whole lot of other things going on. At least I hope so. And now that I’ve written this, I’m wondering if I have to write about any of these topics anymore. Maybe I’m done. Although I have to admit that I have found myself asking theses kind of leading questions about a new topic, asking them to myself …questions of the sort I end up asking friends. A new set of questions. They are about “late.” What is “late?” Is there a “late style”? What does it mean to be in a “late stage”? What comes towards the end? Are there artists or writers who, when they were late, when they were in their late-styles, had special going that something we can learn from? So, maybe there is yet another essay coming. We’ll see.

Poet and lyric essayist Kathryn Nuernberger won the 2015 James Laughlin award, joining the company of poets like fellow BOA Editions pressmates, Li-Young Lee, Jillian Weise, and the late Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Having been familiar with her 2010 Antivenom Poetry Award–winning Rag & Bone, The End of Pink fascinated me with its deftness of language and unique influences. Nuernberger is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where is also serves as the director of Pleiades Press. We recently discussed over email about the role of research in her poetry, and how her directorship plays a role in her reading and writing.

You and I share a bond in that we both live in the state of Missouri these days. Considering you now teach and live in Missouri after doing your doctoral studies in Ohio, did you make a conscious choice to return to your home state? What do you appreciate about the Show-Me State?

I never really expected I’d wind up back in Missouri—like a lot of nerdy art types in the Midwest, I think I had my eye on the coasts as final destination point. But after living in Louisiana, Montana, Washington, and Ohio, I was fortunate to find a great job at University of Central Missouri. I know MO isn’t as sexy as a lot of other places in our union, but I’ve found that are an awful lot of brilliant, creative, wonderfully eccentric people here. And my goodness we do have some weird, wild geological formations and excellent spelunking made possible by our spectacularly karst topography. I’ve got some relations in the Ozarks who have also helped me appreciate the terroir of fried morrel mushrooms with squirrel meat and blackberry wine. And, bless their hearts, they didn’t even throw me out of the house when I started going like the most insufferable elitist you’ve ever met about how all this good food gathered locally in season reminds me of the French notion of terroir. They just said, “Well, ain’t that something.”
Current Missouri Poet Laureate Aliki Barnstone states that “Writing is not just about your individual selfhood but also being empathic with other people.” What’s your opinion regarding empathy, writing, and artistic expression?

I think Aliki said it beautifully. I also like what Frank O’Hara said, very cheekily, in his “Personism Manifesto” about this subject. He wrote, “I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified.” I like the idea of the poem providing a space where there can be a profound sort-of psychic intimacy between the author and the reader that isn’t possible in the real world because basic manners and eye contact and itchy noses and stuff like that make it so tricky and weird to really talk to each other. And I also like the idea of that space being a little casual, a little crass, and maybe with a little room for us to fall in love with each other across time and space.

A mentor of mine once told me that it’s not enough to write about what you know, you have to write about what you want to know. I am thinking of one of my favorite poems of yours is “Translations” from your first collection, Rag & Bone, in which the speaker states:

Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe
of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion
where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields
are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees.

Can you explain how research plays a role in your writing?

Research is often how my poems begin. I start my writing time every day reading poems by other people. By which I mean I start my writing time every day wallowing in profound feelings of self-doubt and inferiority. This may or may not be the best way to do things, but it’s how I do it. And then I try to get my head back on straight so I start reading in other rhetorical modes that don’t make me so keenly aware of my limitations as a poet. I love Public Domain Review and Cabinet a lot, but also art criticism, Wikipedia stubs, and super-dense literary theory.

Sometimes I’ll get on a jag with a particular subject—I went through a women-in-hot-air-balloons phase a couple years back. Spoiler alert: women in hot air balloons for the first hundred years of ballooning were pretty much all prostitutes or opera singers, because everyone thought it was such a scandal to experiment with the effects of the stratosphere on your lady parts. Second spoiler alert: it was very popular to experiment in all sorts of ways with the rocking baskets and also very popular to just chuck your wine bottles out the side into whatever field you were passing. Which was not super-appreciated by the peasants below.

But to get back to your question—once you know the first aeronauts were women shamelessly fornicating their way through the clouds, how can you not write a poem?

Can you explain how The End of Pink came to be a full-length collection? Did you reach out to BOA Editions or did they reach out to you?

I submitted The End of Pink to BOA during their annual open reading period. And then Peter Connors, the director at BOA, called me up and said he wanted it. I like Peter very much, in part because he calls me up very rarely and every time it’s just to say the thing I most want to hear.

As director of Pleiades Press, I’m curious as to how your experience as an editor informs your poetry and vice versa.

I really love how my work as an editor requires/allows me to read hundreds of poetry manuscripts every year. It’s such a great way to encounter a huge range of new poetry—I don’t think I’d read that many books of poetry if “the job” wasn’t breathing down my neck, but I think I’m a better and happier writer for all that reading. Reading influences our work in ways that are so hard to pin down—mostly I’m inspired by what I read, but sometimes I do encounter the cautionary tale. I find it beneficial to be so constantly steeped in this grand ongoing conversation about poetry and through poetry.

Your poetry involves some interesting characters (Benjamin Franklin, Derrida, Bat Boy), how does their presence influence your poetic psyche? Is there a particular historical or cultural individual that you’d like to write about that you haven’t?

I’ve been writing a series of poems about plants historically used for birth control and my research led me to Maria Sibylla Merian, who was the first woman ecologist who traveled to South America in the 1700s to research the plants there. She wrote about the Bird of Paradise, which was a plant that could be used to induce a miscarriage, and while I am fascinated by her, I’m also troubled and disappointed in her, because she did her research in a slave colony and used slave labor to gather her specimens. And though she expressed ambivalence about slavery in her journals, it would be a pathetic stretch to suggest she was any sort of ally. But I keep reading about her because I want to try to find a way to see through the unwritten parts of her story and history more generally to the lives of the women who told her about the uses of this plant.

Those women said that they used the plant for birth control in part to prevent their children from being born into the horrors of slavery and in part to resist their own bodies being used as a commodity by the masters. I’d really like to be able to hear the story of their lives, their struggle, and their resistance in their words. But one of the cruel things about history is the way the voices we most need to hear are the ones that so often are the most aggressively erased.

Can you talk about the role of the Saint Girl persona?

I was raised in a Catholic community that placed a lot of emphasis on morality and social justice. This is a training I appreciated, but there was also a celebration of self-abnegation and insistence on nurturing feelings of guilt and shame that made me feel really messed up.

The Saint Girl persona was born of that tension between feeling a strong desire to do and be good and the contrary notion that happiness might be a necessary part of goodness. Or, to put it more bluntly, I wrote these poems during the years when I was turning away from my work as an activist (among other things, I taught high school in under-resourced schools for a while, and then had a job in the foster care system) and turning towards poetry.

Poetry made me really happy, but I also felt a lot of guilt and uncertainty about the ethics of that choice. So I guess the Saint Girl recipe is something like: (Guilt+Shame) × (Conscience) ÷ Happiness to the power of Poetry = Saint Girl.

One thing I noticed is that you received research grants at the American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life.

These two awesome libraries are kind enough to open their collections to creative writers and artists as well as to historians and other more conventional researchers. I love libraries and I also love auctions and abandoned cabins and oddball museums. These sorts of research libraries are the perfect combination of such wonderful places. The collections at these libraries include rare books, but they can also bring you collections of stereo cards from the 1904 World’s Fair, so you can see the Pike in 3-D by using this rickety old mahogany contraption. Or broadsides used to advertise P. T. Barnum’s huckster operations. Or pamphlets advertising Dr. Kilger’s quack elixirs and tonics.

At the Bakken you can actually crank a felt wheel until static makes your hair stand on end as Benjamin Franklin used to do as a party trick. (Although he’d have ladies of ill repute there so you could kiss them and get a little blue spark between your lips amongst all that frizziness.) These research libraries are wonderful because you get to interact with physical objects and have physical experiences, which all have the potential to become settings and images in poems about historical material.
You also have a collection of lyric essays coming out (Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, Ohio State University Press 2017), how does the fluidity of genres (poetry/lyric essay) play a role in your writing? What draws you to the lyric essay?

I love the way genre-blur writing breaks the rules or just forges ahead, as if there are no rules to even contend with. Sometimes, when I’m rambling about history or science or other experiences, I feel the need to provide a fair amount of context so readers can appreciate the landscape where the facts are unfolding. In these cases an essay is born. Other times when I’m rambling I realize that what readers need are moments of silence so they can really process the images or the factoids as they spring forth. In those cases, line breaks prove very useful. I always think some silence is necessary to create the sense of a phone call across the void, so that’s why I haven’t written prose that doesn’t have the adjective “lyric” attached to it.

Stephen King often states that a writer who writes more than he or she reads is not a writer. So, who and what are you currently reading?

Right now I’m reading (copy editing and laying out, to be precise) EJ Koh’s forthcoming book of poems, A Lesser Love, for Pleiades Press. It’s going to blow all your minds when it comes out next fall. And I keep rereading Nance Van Winckel’s Book of No Ledge, which contains collage and erasure poems made out of an old Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set. Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude has been keeping me feeling sane and hopeful about human goodness and the beauty of supportive communities in these grim times; while Adrian C. Louis’s poems have been keeping me as pissed off and riled up as I think we also all need to be.

Last question: What is the greatest piece of advice you received from an instructor or mentor?

Maya Jewell Zeller always tells me to try writing it backwards and with more plants in it. Ellen Welcker tells me to quit giving those dead white guys the benefit of the doubt. Laura Read says to start with a song and a great longing. And Jaswinder Bolina once told me to quit whining, in a less blunt and more gentle way. That might be the best advice I ever got.

Stephen Furlong is a graduate student at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, MO. His poetry, reviews, and/or interviews have previously appeared in or are forthcoming from Chariton Review,Big Muddy, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. Additionally, he has a poem in the forthcoming anthology A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault, edited by Joanna C. Valente.